My take on the Shows I saw in NY

The Addams Family

I haven’t read any of the reviews of this show but I’d heard that the show was panned. At the end of Act one I was baffled as to why. Here we are in a world that we are all vaguely familiar with (from the TV show if NOT from the Movie or the actual comic strip), the characters are fun and witty, the writing is good with lots of belly laughs, the lyrics are very polished and the score is pretty good too, not to mention the Star Power of Nathan and Bebe. Hell ‘One Normal Night’ is worth the price of admission alone.

So Act two didn’t quite measure up to Act one. It was a bit ballad heavy in a show that’s NOT about love stories. Well actually it’s almost EXCLUSIVELY about love stories but it’s NOT those stories that drive the show, it’s the witty patter and the wonderfully odd and backward characters that delight and intrigue us. But even with Act two being not quite the zinger we’d hoped, I still very much loved this show and would recommend it. I think the production values might suffer a little on the road, it’s a tech heavy show, but I still think it would be a great sell.

Million Dollar Quartet

What a perfect one act show! And there is absolutely NO WAY you can stay in your seat at the end of this curtain call. It’s got a little angst, a little drama, a little love, a little betrayal, a lot of nostalgia and a whole bunch of great performances. I had no idea what this show was about till I got to the theatre and read the walls out front of the theatre. Apparently there was one golden night at Sun Records when Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins (all Sam Phillips discoveries) were at a recording session. This is a fantasy (based loosely on fact) of what might have happened at that session. I think this would do GREAT on the road. It’s a one set wonder (with some glam at the end), has a small cast, and a fully contained orchestra, no hiring on the road. Big Glitz and low overhead. Huge Fun.

American Idiot

I very much liked this show. I was surprised that I recognized 3 songs (though vaguely) from the show. My music listening does NOT trend toward Green Day, but I am a child of the 70s and am prone to love rock n roll musicals just cuz it’s rock. There is a story, but it’s not very interesting or binding, but the show is NOT about the story, it’s about the music.

I love Broadway. Broadway is Plays (39 steps), it’s Musicals (Wicked), it’s Dance shows (Come Fly Away) it’s plays with music (Spring Awakening) and it’s shows like Idiot which is basically a Jukebox show. Idiot is like a beautiful abstract painting. In fact, if Genet or Ionesco were to write a modern musical I bet it would sound something like this, except a lot more dissonant. Idiot is not hard on the ear – it’s a punk pop mix of music that’s nice to listen to (isn’t THAT a contradiction). It’s visually stunning, extremely well performed, and a loosely strung together evening of fun. Oh and its got the BEST, most artistically satisfying Pas de Foy I’ve ever seen. Brilliant!

I still believe that the highest pinnacle of art that can be achieve on Broadway is a well crafted musical that IS a great story, whose music furthers the plot, whose choreography furthers the action, whose lyrics are witty and delightful and that starts you on solid ground and ends by taking you into the stratosphere. BUT that’s not to say that there isn’t LOTS of room for other kinds of art. I want a Broadway that has the above, AND an American Idiot et al with all their faults and foibles.

I don’t know how well it will sell on the road. I think it would do ok in our Balboa Theatre, NOT our Civic. I spoke to a booking agent that’s done some research and apparently San Diego is in the top 20 markets for Green Day enthusiasts. I’m curious to see how this plays out.

Race

God Mamet, Mamet to Hell. This play was surprisingly easy on the language (for Mamet), but then it DOES take place in a Lawyers office NOT a junk store. Very provocative, very intriguing, very captivating. Spader is brilliant, I expected more from David Alan Grier but he’s fine, Richard Thomas has a surprisingly small part but does it really well and Kerry Washington is very good. As a whole it’s a great play. They had a strange pause between the two scenes of act two. They brought in the main and did a slow fade up on it, held, faded out then raised it. We see this a lot in Opera between major scene changes. Usually the raising of the grand reveals a whole new set, not here. I can only think it was done to help break up Act 2 which was considerably longer than Act 1. I hear Eddie Izzard will replace David Spader. Hmmmm. I’d like to see that. Expect this to make the Regional Theatre circuit in a season or two. I’d expect it at the Globe.

La Cage Aux Folles

Ahhhh what a breath of fresh air. A pure musical of perfect structure and unquestionable quality. Fantastic performers sing sensational songs, act their hearts out in heart wrenching and warming scenes, and dancers wow you with their provocative and communicative movement. Every scintilla of stagecraft is dedicated to the story which is crafted by the creators (way back when) and interpreted by this production team with he highest skill and aesthetic intelligence. Kelsey Grammer and Douglas Hodge are the perfect married couple struggling with their very unconventional life and the cast carries this torch with aplomb. Grammer’s star power doesn’t hurt none either.

Memphis

I met the lead performers of this one at the party the night before I saw the show so it was fun seeing them do their thing on the stage and knowing a little back story. This is a plot driven show with strong if one dimensional characters and a compelling if predictable plot. I saw it late in the week so I may have been having a bit of overload of shows playing the Race card and centering around the birth of rock and roll. It didn’t warm the cockles of my soul or delight me to the core, but it did entertain me and I enjoyed my evening of theatre. I prefer musicals to send you out with a happy ending, but this one is – well – not a tragedy really, sort of a melancholia ending. I bet the Brits would love it. They love their downer shows. It did it’s out of town work here in La Jolla so it will be interesting to see if it comes here or if we get it. It might go right back to the Playhouse if it tours here at all.

A Behanding in Spokane

Sunday morning I had a little time to kill so I went to see Iron Man 2 and low and behold there was the Lobby Receptionist from Behanding as Tony Starks rival! I’d seen only the first few minutes of The Hurt Locker (too much puke cam for me) so I didn’t recognize the boyfriend from behanding but apparently he had a major role in the movie. So this show had a lot of Hollywood exposure. Cuz of course it stars Christopher Walken. This was a sick and twisted, creepy story that felt a bit like one of those Irish plays (they seem to love violence and creep). This play looked like it was SOOO much fun to do. The cast was at a panel (saw the panel before I saw the play) and they were obviously enjoying themselves. They were asked if they had any commitment to doing the show on the road. The backpedalling was funny to behold.

Billy Elliot

I totally get what all the fuss is about. This is a great story, well told using all the creative elements of the stage. And then you have the amazing talent of that kid. In my humble opinion however, this COULD have been a musical for the ages, one of the great ones. The music is really good but didn’t quite have the hooks or anything that might be a set piece or a hit. The direction was a little too self indulgent here and there. The story could do with some tightening up. All of this is pickiuny stuff that only a Musical Theatre Egghead like me would find to even bring up. This is a great show that should tour very well.

Fela

This was a complete immersion into a very different, very colorful and very engaging culture. Here again I was almost wholly ignorant of what this show was before I got there. The whole theatre is transformed so it feels very much like environmental theatre and the performers enter the stage from the house. This show was a lot like Idiot in its structure. There’s a thin bit of a story to frame the very agreeable music and to showcase the really amazing talent onstage. I can’t see this selling on tour though. I’d love to be proved wrong on that.

Come Fly Away

Twyla Tharp has SOOO done it again. The technology to play Sinatra’s voice and balance it with a live band is so wonderfully seamless. The movement of those exquisite dancers conveyed their characterizations beautifully and the story was just a joy to watch. This is a sure fire home run on the road. Come to San Diego Franky!

The Whisper House -- At the Old Globe in San Diego

It’s a Duncan Sheik show, so you gotta compare it to Spring Awakening right? This one was even more of a play with music than Spring was. The show is 90 minutes with no intermission but there was only about 20 minutes of stage worthy material there. With Spring you had the raw energy of the kids sexuality all over the stage to carry through the ‘with music’ part and to make you forget the anachronistic nature of the modern music against the period piece. We don’t have that teen angst in Whisper so the anachronisms are like cymbal crashes at a cello concert. The handheld mics, micstands, and modern day musical styles and lyrics are jarring.

The vocalists were highly stylized with thin and shallow voices amplified to match the volume of the band. They were very good singers for the style of music they were working with but I have to say that when the kid sang his 2 or 3 bars at the end of the show, I wanted to hear much more of THAT voice. It sounded stronger than the two ghosts put together. We had the same quality of lyrics in this show (rhyming ‘Boston’ with ‘caution’) that we had in Spring (where we rhymed ‘jump’ with ‘come’) but again we were able to look past that while experiencing Spring; we just figured we weren’t watching a William Finn show and got over it – cuz there was so much there on stage to keep you there. Whisper however seems like it’s attempting to be real theatre, therefore it can’t lean on the audiences willingness to forgive the raw untrained quality of the piece that was a given for Spring.

You have to earn every moment of stage time. That’s true for the actor as well as the director and the writer. If you are going to repeat lyrics you need a good reason for it. In Pop music it just the style, but the stage requires the performance to engage the audience with each moment, each silence, each note and each lyric. Pop repetitions in the tunes were just repetitious. The songs were good for what they were. They’d likely be very nice in a concert setting or on a recording, they just didn’t do anything to move the story along.

The exposition led us to believe that we were going to learn a lot about these ghosts in the lighthouse. It was a disappointment to find that the exposition of the ghost story was simply there to justify their presence in the play. Their plight and haunting were barely reference in the body of the play.

It wasn’t a BAD night of theatre, but it certainly wasn’t engaging either. I’m glad I went. I like to see lots of different kind of stuff and anything with music is truly my cup of tea. I would recommend it if you don’t have to pay full price.

What Do You See!!

The gripping tensile strength of art lies in its complete subjectivity. Take Andy Warhol’s can of tomato soup. Whaddaysee? Take a second and think about it, what DO you see??

Uwannaknow what I see? A ticketing system. A metaphor of the business that I’m in. You go to the store you grab the soup you go to the register you pay your 2 bucks for the soup. BUT there’s more than soup in that purchase. You don’t think of it right at first but you just paid a Canning Fee, a Labeling Fee, a Packaging and Transportation Fee, a Retail Markup Fee – you can probably think up a few more can’t you?

Every company that participated in getting that can of soup into your hands got a piece of your 2 bucks. If your receipt had that all broken out into its individual parts, if each company’s chunk of the pie was allocated, separated and defined you would look at all those fees and charges and you might have a complaint or two about this outrage!

I don’t WANNA pay a Canning Fee or a Labeling Fee. I just want the soup. BUT you can’t get the soup without paying for what it takes to get it to you. You just want soup? No label or can or delivery? Grow the ingredients and make it yourself. After you’ve spent the time effort and energy to make that can of soup yourself, suddenly that Canning Fee is gonna look like a good deal won’t it? You might start thinking ‘How did they do that so cheaply?’

But the food peeps have figured out that you don’t need or want all those costs broken out, you just want the grand total. The only thing broken out is, you know it, the tax.

You can’t buy an evening with AC/DC without paying for what it takes to get them on that stage, and to get you in that seat. For some reason MY industry finds it necessary to break out all the fees and charges and show them to you. What is that? Honesty? Integrity? Foolishness? Amazing how Mr. Patron will fork out hundreds of bucks of his hard earned dough to a scalper for great seats at an astronomical price without seeing and without questioning the breakdown of costs. But have the legitimate ticket supplier whose name you recognize all too well plainly and forthrightly inform the patron of the pieces and parts, and suddenly they’re the devil.

By the way, that scalper didn’t get that ticket without paying all those fees, so guess who’s paying them in the end?

AND the MASTER is the MASTER for a reason, cuz she’s damn good at what she does. She is a corporation out to make a buck by doing what she does better than anyone else has found a way yet, and way better than you could do it by yourself. And just for the record, they are REALLY great people. I’ve met them and worked with them and they not just pros, they’re friendly, love their work, and love to help me do mine.

So the next time you find yourself looking at a list of fees you’ve paid to see your favorite act, consider the Can of Soup. That list exists in your air fare your martini your box of screws – it’s just not broken out for you as honestly as your ticket purchase is.

Oh and guess what part ISN’T broken out separately? You SHOULD know it, the tax.

An Hour and a Half of Belly Laughs

I guess my blog is turning into a series of Movie Reviews. That's so strange because I'm so NOT a movie guy. Maybe that's why I find that the rare times I DO go, I need to blog about them. There's probably something psychological in this phenomenon. There's got to be a particularly compelling feature to get me to go see a film, and this one certainly qualified. The subject matter screams my name and I'm a huge fan of Bill Maher anyway. Last night I found myself in a cinema with no one under 30; that alone was refreshing.

I was at a seminar recently where we were asked to write down our own personal top 10 accomplishments. One of mine was successfully extricating my life from religion. That was particularly huge for me considering how completely and fully I believed. I was a faithful and obedient evangelical with my life, my mind, my heart, my time, my money . . . my everything. It probably took a good 10 years to completely detoxify. It’s that background that makes this film appeal so much to me. It presents a point of view, but it’s not polemic in the least AND it’s extremely entertaining. There’s nothing there that you won’t get from the dvd but I couldn’t wait to see something smart and brash and very funny. This is definitely NOT an escapist movie; you need to bring your brain and your wits.

Bill brings to light the silliness of many doctrines of the world’s major religions. The documentary is basically a series of interviews with people from these religions and Bill’s frank and honest reflections on them from the mind of a non believer. It' so hilarious you have to time your handfulls of popcorn carefully. But it’s all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out. The last few minutes of the movie he sums up how dangerous it has been in the past, and more importantly how dangerous it is now and can be in the future to have Church in your State. That was enlightening.

Anyway – this one was defiantly worth seeing.

Not your typical Chick Flick
Mamma Mia the movie

Oh a chick flick it is, and that’s for certain. Unless you happen to belong to the sick and twisted group of people who owned every ABBA 8 track ever put out, AND you played them nonstop at high decibels in your 68 Mustang all through your salad days; then the demographic for this film shifts firmly in your direction. But I can’t imagine there are a lot of peeps out there like me.

It blew me away in Sweeney Todd that such non singers could pull off the main roles in a movie musical. But Mamma Mia proves it even more. Star power and good credible acting (along with great music of course) is more important that a quality voice. Who’d a thunk. Meryl Streep could simply NOT carry this role on stage. She can sing, and sing pretty well, but not well enough to carry the audience in a theatre. The audience in a cinema is a different story. If you’d have put a Broadway Belter in that role in this movie who could tear up those tunes, they wouldn’t have even touched the amazing performance Streep put in here—it’s simply her star power and the command she has over her tools. Here’s arguably the best actor of our time, at her peak, and doing what very well may be termed her signature performance. If she doesn’t win another Oscar for this, the academy needs to reboot.

This beautiful image of Paula and what appears to be her moron husband was shot by Sean Capshaw http://www.resolusean.com/

Did you know that there are vineyards in San Marcos? I sure didn’t, but last Sunday night I found out that they do indeed exist when we had an amazing meal at a table set up between two vines under the night sky, awash with wine and candles and attended by lovely people and lively conversation. The setting was at the steps of the Vintner’s home overlooking a lovely valley of grapes and upscale homes. Paula and I got invited to this very mysterious dinner and we’d no idea what we were getting ourselves into. But we’d do just about anything that the very good friends that invited us told us to so, up we dressed and off we went. What it turned out to be was an opportunity for a caterer to show off what he can do for lots of current and potential clients and to do so in a very special location.

Talk about ambiance. I can’t imagine a more tranquil setting or a better atmosphere for an event such as this. Excellent service by some very good and very nice waiters that had to put up with an awful lot; there is not a lot of room between a couple of vine rows to put a table with chairs on both sides and still find a way to move in to serve and service, but these pros did it and did it well.

If only the stuff we were putting in our mouths was better. Don’t get me wrong, it was good. There were terrific words like watercress, quail egg, confite and sweetbread and there was a taste of wine for each course. The food was good but there was nothing I’d have again and the wines were, hmmm shall we say disappointing. You expect that getting served wines from a winery at the winery at a shwanky shindig like this that your high expectations would be fulfilled. The first three wines they served us were hardly drinkable, then they brought us a Cabernet that was good enough, and they ended with a Syrah that was quite wonderful; a great way to end the evening.

So I count the dining experience we had as a great success, mostly because the ambiance was so hugely and so unexpectedly wonderful that it made everything else less important. I would certainly do this again, and still hope for a more pleasant proffering for the palate.

Phantom, the longest running show on Broadway since . . .

April 10th, 2008 by Tim Heitman

Check this out. On December 2, 1979, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (July 14-19, 2009) lost its title as the longest running show in Broadway history. It fell to the perennial favorite GREASE. GREASE (March 3-8, 2009) was the longest running show on Broadway till it was knocked out of the top spot by A CHORUS LINE (August 12-17, 2008) When CATS (June 3-8, 2008) hit 6138 performances, it overtook A CHORUS LINE as the longest running show in Broadway history–and on January 9, 2006, PHANTOM (July 16 – August 10 2008) became the undisputed king of Broadway, and it’s still running today.

In the next calendar year and a half, Broadway/San Diego and the San Diego Civic Theatre will house the top 5 record breaking Broadway shows of all time. So what makes PHANTOM so great? Romance, mystery, drama, and the aura of higher art ‘Opera’ are typical responses. Of course the great music is always the first and foremost reason. But then there’s that amazing set that transforms time and again, just when you think you’ve seen it all it does one more amazing thing. And the costumes? It’s a great period piece and the production takes full advantage of that fact – the costume designers put ALL the money on the stage. And what about the lighting? Or the props? Or the . . .

Because PHANTOM has such universal appeal, it has become somewhat of an entry experience to the theatre. Many people when asked “what was your first show” will reply “PHANTOM”. The show has been responsible for so many people getting ‘hooked’ on theatre. The numbers on this show in terms of attendance, dollars earned, performances worldwide et cetera are staggering. Its just such a phenomenon and I’m really looking forward to the return of the show to San Diego.


Oh and by the way, before FIDDLER it was HELLO DOLLY, and there’s no production of that on the horizon. Oh well, you can’t have everything.

And also by the way, there have been other shows that ran longer than those that I’ve mentioned above but they didn’t break previously set records. They ran or are running while another show was or is the title holder.

Click this link: Playbill for the list of longest runs in Broadway history as listed in Playbill. See where YOUR favorites fit in.